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Studio Improvisation, 1 March 2017

I thought it would be interesting to show what goes on in my studio. My neighbour thinks I watch porn all day. Never! That's a slur on my good name. What I actually do is experiment day after day, come to terms with failure as part of the process and occasionally learn something new and useful. It's a fundamentally human process, much under-rated in the current era. From this learning process I eventually make new work.

This short video shows me at work experimenting in the studio with two hand-made bowed psalteries, an ebow (electronic bow) and metal preparations - spring steel and ferrite rods, bandsaw blade, nails. The idea here is to make the ebow agitate the metal or whatever else I place on the psaltery, producing anything from a pendulum-like shimmering sound to a electronic/metallic percussive sound with a background sheen of string resonance. People often ask how I create the sounds in my compositions so I've demonstrated this by closing the gap between studio experiment and completed work. The sound in the video is taken from Koobi Fora Ash, a finished piece, released on my Bandcamp pages, which uses the same materials. After several recording sessions, I select, edit, timestretch and filter, re-record and so on till the job's done and it's time to mix. Interested to hear what others do.